Last month, Santa Ono was vying to become the next president of the University of Florida, and declared in an opinion essay that he believed in Florida’s “vision for higher education.”

But on Tuesday, the state’s higher education leaders said they did not believe in Dr. Ono.

A board overseeing Florida’s public universities unexpectedly rejected his bid to lead the 60,000-student Gainesville campus. The officials expressed concerns about his leadership at the University of Michigan, where he was president, criticizing its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion program and what they characterized as its failures to curb antisemitism. Even though Dr. Ono sought to distance himself from those efforts, board officials said they did not find his new posture credible.

The state-level saga over Dr. Ono’s candidacy comes as the federal government wages an assault on the nation’s colleges, revealing how deeply politicized higher education has become. His failed bid was welcomed by those on the right and even some on the left who believed he had tailored his message depending on the audience he was addressing.

In May, the Gainesville campus’s board of trustees unanimously approved Dr. Ono for the job, but the Board of Governors, which oversees the 12-institution state university system, shot down the nomination in a 10-to-6 vote. The decision came after a four-hour hearing during which the governors peppered him with questions about his time at Michigan.

It did not seem to matter to the Florida officials that his previous university’s diversity program had preceded Dr. Ono, who arrived in 2022, and that he had presided over its dismantling. Supporters of pro-Palestinian activism on Michigan’s campus also said that Dr. Ono had taken a hard-line approach against them.

Dr. Ono’s effort to leap from Michigan to the red-state higher education politics of Florida, known for trying to stamp out “woke ideology,” ended with him out of a job and the $1.5 million base salary it came with.